The Remote Report: A Cleveland Browns Win By Any Means Necessary

I don’t know a lot*. I do know that I was angry to see that, as predicted, Jimmy Haslam III came in and immediately started making moves to the front office of a team that is clearly better than it was last year.

Bringing in new people means that you’re going to ask fans to be patient while the news guys get settled in and get it right. I don’t want to wait 2-5 more years. I don’t want to wait one more year. I don’t want to wait…for our lives to be over (I’m really sorry about that). Seriously though, owners come in and don’t care about the fans when they make the purchase, then spend the first several months of their tenure catering to the fans and making it seem like they’re the most important part of the entire professional sports world. It doesn’t make sense.

But that’s the weird part. It doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t matter. I realized that I do not care who owns the Cleveland Browns. Have

fun, Mr. Haslam. You’re not on the field. I want you to put the best people on the field, and I want them on the field now. I want this team to keep winning football games at, the very least, an average rate.

I’m upset that things shook out exactly how we all knew they would. Tom Heckert will be gone, even though he’s done great things in the draft the last two years. Pat Shurmur will probably be gone, which I’m still on the fence about. He’s been given such a crappy hand, bad breaks left and right, and the team has been disappointing. But that’s the NFL. If Haslam’s people do a great job and the team continues to improve going into next season, then it reflects on the Heckert days even better. On the flip side, if the new guys come in and the team plays poorly next year, it is because of Heckert’s guys and it’ll be another two years of rebuilding. It seems like I’m going to just be upset with these people no matter what happens. I am an angry old man.

No matter what, I just want the Browns to actually win football games against other teams in the NFL. I don’t care how they get to that point, I just want that point to be here. Now. Relevancy is almost at hand. Somehow, this team took my favorite week of the year – the one where they win their first game – and made me upset about it. If the Browns lose to the Indianapolis Colts on Sunday, suddenly everything is a wash and I’m back to being furiously angry about everything.

This is a little off-topic, and I apologize because I’m scatterbrained tonight, but there was an air in Red Ivy when I walked in for the Browns game against Cincinnati last week. We knew there was a win in the works. Several people were saying it to each other before the game started. It just felt like a win. The team has gotten better almost every week, albeit with some hiccups, and major steps forward have been taken. We just knew that the Browns would win.

I have a feeling that the Colts game will be the same. I don’t want to jinx anything, and I’ll never write something into an article that predicts the outcome of the game, but I do feel like the Browns will win this week. Not guaranteeing it. Just know that, looking back, the team is 1-1 with its best defensive player, Joe Haden, and should really be 2-0 with him. That’s not bad.